Exhibition: Valentin Goppel: Between the Years

Leica Gallery London is exhibiting work by Valentin Goppel, winner of the prestigious Leica Oskar Barnack Newcomer Award for photography in 2022. The works on display are from Goppel’s series, Between the Years, a tender perspective on young adults living 'through' the time of Corona.

This up-close-and-personal project, which later became part of a much bigger commission at the request of the German newspaper Die Zeit, documents how for Goppel, along with many of his friends, the initial euphoria surrounding Covid was replaced by disorientation, isolation, and uncertainty. Through both staged and observed imagery, Goppel strives to relay the emotions experienced during this strange time. Ironically, for the photographer the pursuit of image led him briefly out of his own isolation.

"Many of the people I photographed were the friends I had been missing for months. It was not difficult to explain to them what pictures I was looking for, we were all in the middle of it and knew how the other was feeling. It is strange how similar things have been for us in recent months - yet we all felt so alone."

Perhaps the biggest revelation in the project for Goppel was realising that Covid, rather than causing this seeping insecurity and anxiety, was perhaps just a catalyst for what was already there: the unsettling feelings which are part of growing up and transitioning from a child to an adult, he was still a teenager when he began the shooting the series.